VIEW FROM A FOLDING CHAIR

Mónica de la Torre

Never decorative, it embodies a chair’s provisional character.
Utilitarian, never just there, called upon to serve.
Communal, egalitarian, leveling its occupants, gathered for an
occasion.
Rarely will it hold the sitter captive. Its precariousness invites
walkouts, even when the seat is secured by an admittance fee.
Repositionable, it favors assorted geometries of attention: the
frontal and single-focused, the shifting and radial.
Irreverent, whether in an institutional setting or not, signaling
reversible orders.
Possibly carnivalesque, displaying an upside-down world, as in:

a projection of the high-desert landscape and transit

surrounding an old ice plant in the desert

requiring no other technology but a lens and a dark room;

ironically inverted in this picture of a tiny fraction of the

planet—

with no search engine logo and copyright date camouflaged

to appear like a wisp of a stratus cloud—

is the electrical plant across the street
grids reversed, as is the soundtrack, extemporaneously

produced

by the cars and pickup trucks seen fleeting by from east to

west though by the sound we know they’re going west

to east, and vice versa;

a projection within a projection
these are moving images to experience, but not keep.

Unsung, stacked, piled against a wall, or hidden in closets,
folding chairs will be counted on again since, plastic palace
people, they’re both transience and ritual.
Welcome into the fold. Who cares what the future brings.